“Jil Jung Juk”… Many amusing bits, but they don’t add up

Deeraj Vaidy’s Jil Jung Juk is the kind of movie where an action scene is set to a hopped-up version of Nee maatale maayanura. The song is Poorvikalyani on acid; the film is everything on acid. Which probably explains Jil’s (Siddharth) peacock-shaded hair, and the predominance of a colour that’s surely the result of a one-night stand between cotton candy and a vial of Potassium Permanganate. We see this colour in the Bond-style opening credits, on a car, and in the lighting in a song sequence. Why, you ask? This isn’t about meaning. It’s about mood. It’s about quirk, attitude. It’s about Pai (Bipin) affecting the Whatsapp Swamiji’s hysterical tone. It’s about a Tamannaah-Hansika-type starlet named Sonu Sawant being introduced with this legend: And the award for best North Indian heroine playing bubbly South Indian girl goes to… Something about that name is hilarious. Every time someone said “Sonu Sawant,” I cracked up. And in a genius stretch, Sonu Sawant slips into the role of a television cookery-show hostess and, in chaste broken Tamil, outlines Jil’s criminal plan as if outlining a recipe – each step of the plan becomes an “ingredient” of the recipe. It’s the most ingenious thing I’ve seen since the Su Su Sundaralingam mashup in Vaayai Moodi Pesavum.

But the film, a road movie revolving around the drug trade in 2020, isn’t consistent. It’s a lawless world, people will do anything for money – sounds an awful lot like 2o16. Which is another way of saying that the film could have been set in 2016, but where’s the cool quotient in that? Quirk works best as flavouring; here it is the main dish. One character comes with the name Attack. Another is called Rolex Rawther. There’s animation. There’s that mesh effect from older comic books. Some of this works. I loved the touch of locations being named not via text at the bottom of the screen but through picture postcards bearing the names. “Deiva’s House… Deivaa Voodu.” But by the time a cop appeared with a hand camera, recording his observations in pulp-novel purple prose, I began to disengage. Vishal Chandrasekhar’s score is a metaphor for the movie. It’s terrific (as standalone music), but it also tries terrifically hard to set up each scene as cool and wacky – there’s just no variation. It’s like a wardrobe filled with Bappi Lahiri’s suits. After a while, you just want a pair of jeans.

There’s no denying how in-sync the collaborators are, and you appreciate the arrow-straight narrative – no comedy track, no romance. The dialogues are stuffed with mischievous wordplay. (“Ivanga mela naan ‘gun’ vachirukken.” And in a scene with Nasser, “Vaada en thevar magane.”) The writing is pretty solid too – seemingly inconsequential asides (a character’s interest in world cinema, a mention about cheerleaders, a reference to someone’s father) return in the form of lip-smacking payoffs. The cast (including Avinash Raghudevan’s Jung, Sananth Reddy’s Juk) is game. But the film keeps you at an arm’s length. No one seems to be in any real danger. Even the villains are buffoons – and we stop caring. The final stretch is especially tedious. (That skeleton… Really?) The bits don’t add up to an acid-trip whole. And why is the butterfly effect invoked here? If a butterfly flaps its wings in a Kodambakkam studio, will the Sathyam theatre audience laugh?

Brangan, I mostly agree with your analysis, and towards the end it could have been tightened up, but I still enjoyed it nonetheless. I’ll take movie like this that’s bursting at the seams, even if it doesn’t cohere into an ultimately satisfying whole, over most of the forgettable crap that’s out there. Whatever its faults, it certainly wasn’t pandering or trying to do the same old thing.

Sometimes the score was overbearing or too on-the-nose. For example, in that stretch where that one guy talks about going to Thailand the score turns into something Asian-sounding, and whenever Rolex Rawther was on-screen the score often sounded Middle Eastern. The score itself was good, though as part of a movie it sometimes felt like it was trying too hard.

brangan, got a question for you. How come you never mentioned anything about the tributes to Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino in this film? Car trunk shots, intercuts to cartoons. There have been literally truckloads of films that have been singularly influenced by these filmmakers, that’s left me puzzled. Jil Jung Juk, Burma, 144, Sutta Kadhai, Sarabham, Soodhu Kavvum, Moodar Koodam, Mankatha, Aaranya Kaandam. There’s enough to write a book titled “Lock Stock Barrelgalum Kodambakkamum”

In these films, not only is there a tendency to have a motley bunch of quirky characters, but there’s quest for money in there somewhere in all of these plots. And I’m wondering what’s happening here.

Please don’t get the intent of my question wrong. I’m not pointing a quivering finger at the filmmakers shouting “copy cat”. I’m not asking “Why da you are not getting inspired by Mani Rathnam or Balachander?” I’m scratching my beard wondering if there’s a single CD shop tucked away in Chennai somewhere that’s supplying DVDs and placing inceptions in the minds of young movie makers. Or is it that a first-time filmmaker finds it easier to cook up a plot by throwing in a few wacky characters and pouring the “chance” sauce all over them? Or is there something in Guy Ritchie and Tarantino that’s making our filmmakers luvv them?